American Painting

Before them, the Hudson River School had made the American landscape itself the subject, painting it between about 1825 and 1870 as a wilderness that reflected God. By the 1870s that style had gone out of favour, as American collectors turned to the French Barbizon painters. French Impressionism reached New York in an 1886 exhibition, and Americans liked the landscapes but were put off by the nudes.

Homer claimed no master at all. He began as a magazine illustrator, and his clean outlines and strong darks carried into the Maine seascapes he painted from 1883, such as The Fog Warning. His Breezing Up, shown at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, sends a father and three boys out for a spirited sail across Gloucester harbour. Sargent went the other way: trained in Paris, based in London, painting commissioned portraits in the grand manner and, off duty, informal pictures touched by Impressionism. Monet himself said Sargent was not an Impressionist in the French sense.

The two did meet on paper. Both were prolific watercolourists, and Homer's sea pictures, slow to sell, never matched the popularity of Sargent's flattering portraits. The New York realists of the early 1900s, the Ashcan school among them, felt the influence of both.